Tuesday, May 06, 2008

Victory!

So according to State Department records, I now speak Latvian as fluently as I speak Spanish. I kinda doubt that. But, I took the test, I got the score I was hoping for, and I'm cleared to go speak like a Latvian four-year-old to various dignitaries at their Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

P.s. "Kļūt" is Latvian for "to become." It was chosen because it's a fun word to look at, though not to conjugate.

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Guatemala? Rio de Janeiro? Huh?

This journal once chronicled the experience of a low-level American diplomat living in Guatemala. Then he went to Latvia, and Afghanistan, and then back "home" to Washington, DC for a bit. He is now serving in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. If you are one of the few people of no blood relation to the authors who has come here in search of Guatemalan content, here are a few choices from the archives that we like:

In Afghanistan, the photographic opportunities were often limited to what we could sneak with a point-and-shoot camera out the bulletproof window of a speeding SUV. But sometimes we got out and about. A few favorites from that tour:

We've also vacationed aggressively in each region we've been posted in, and taken some epic home leave trips, usually leading to better photos than those where we were posted. Those photos are included in the blog, but somehow holiday snaps seem beneath this sidebar.